Tag Archives: xperfview

Slow Symbol Loading in Microsoft’s Profiler, Take Two

Posted on November 4, 2014 by brucedawson

When I run into a problematically slow program I immediately reach for a profiler so that I can understand the problem and either fix it or work around it. This guidance applies even when the slow program is a profiler. … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, xperf | Tagged , , , , | 20 Comments

The New WPA Xperf Trace Viewer–New Bugs and Old

Posted on July 26, 2013 by brucedawson

Every Windows performance expert should be using xperf traces. My preferred viewer for xperf traces is WPA – Windows Performance Analyzer. However the Windows 8 version of this tool has a few bugs in its display of custom ETW events. … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, xperf | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Xperf Symbol Loading Pitfalls

Posted on October 4, 2012 by brucedawson

Analyzing xperf traces is virtually impossible if you don’t have symbols. Unfortunately the xperf toolkit makes it easy to end up with symbols that takes hours to load, or don’t load at all. Update, July 2020: this blog post is … Continue reading →

Posted in Symbols, xperf | Tagged , , , , | 24 Comments

Xperf for Excess CPU Consumption

Posted on September 3, 2011 by brucedawson

When an application is slow you can, in my experience, generally categorize the problem as CPU bound or CPU idle. Either the CPU is spending an annoyingly long time on computing some result, or the CPU is idle, waiting on … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, xperf | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments